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Restoration Of Israel
The Ingathering
By ONE FOR ISRAEL (Messianic Jews
In Israel)
“For
I will bring them back to their own land that I gave to their fathers. Behold,
I am sending for many fishers, declares the Lord, and they shall catch them.
And afterwards I will send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from
every mountain and every hill, and out of the clefts of the rocks.” (Jeremiah
16:15-16)
The
miracles of God’s promises to Israel continue to unfold; the good, the bad and
the ugly.
In
very many places, the Scriptures prepare us for the fact that God was planning
to bring His people back to His land by hook or by crook.
With
anti-Semitism spiraling out of all control around the world, many Jewish people
are now deciding that they would be safer in war-torn Israel under the
protection of the IDF than they are in Europe, and are packing their bags to
escape while they still can.
They
are being hunted and hounded back to the land given to their fathers, just as
the Bible said.
“Therefore,
behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when it shall no longer be
said, ‘As the Lord lives who brought up the people of Israel out of the land of
Egypt’, but ‘As the Lord lives who brought up the people of Israel out of the
north country and out of all the countries where he had driven them.’"(Jeremiah
16:14)
The regathering of God’s people to their land is one of
the most frequently predicted prophecies in the Bible.
There
have always been Jewish people living in Israel, and several waves of Jewish
immigrants arrived long before 1948, buying property and working the land.
And
the waves of immigration continue to pour in now that Israel has become an
independent state.
In
Isaiah 11:11, God promised to stretch out his hand to regather Israel from the
four corners of the earth “a second time” (the first time being from the
lands of the Babylonian exile).
We
know from Hosea 3:4-5 that it would occur in the last days and Amos 9:15 tells
us that they will never be uprooted again.
The
conflict in Gaza unleashed such international fury that the line between
criticism of the Jewish state and hatred of the Jewish people became rapidly
blurred and then, in many cases, just vanished altogether.
Now
that we are seeing young Jewish men and women beaten on the streets of Canada,
a dentist refusing to treat Jews in Belgium, synagogues sieged in France and
firebombed in Germany, British supermarkets clearing Kosher foods off their
shelves, swastikas appearing in America and a trend on twitter insisting that
Hitler was right all along, Jewish people are considering leaving the smashed
windows of their Western businesses, and taking refuge in the Jewish State –
the one place on earth they can call home.
The centre of Jewish gravity has finally moved from
America to Israel, which now houses the largest population of Jewish people in
the world.
There
are approximately 14 million Jewish people in the world today, around 0.2% of
the global population.
Just
over 8 million people now live in Israel in total; three quarters of whom are
Jewish, with the remaining quarter having Arab or ‘other’ ethnic backgrounds.
Israel
continues to have one of the highest standards of living, in terms of
education, life expectancy, safety for minorities, and economic prosperity, in
the Middle East.
Over
three million Jewish people have left their homes and emigrated to Israel since
1948, a move which is known as “making aliyah”.
Biblically,
moving to Israel or ascending to Jerusalem is referred to as “going up”
and leaving is “going down”; the word aliyah means “going up” or
ascending.
And
the number of Europeans making this move will also be markedly ascending in the
wake of vitriolic and violent outbreaks of anti-Semitism, the likes of which we
have not seen since the rise of the Third Reich.
It is
quite staggering how quickly the world has forgotten its history. But the
people of Israel have vowed never to forget, and are packing up and boarding
airplanes back to the land of their fathers.
I
heard a rabbi once speculate about this verse in Isaiah, as possibly describing
the method of transport by which God will do this – first by ship, and then “flying
like a cloud”:
“Who
are these that fly like a cloud, and like doves to their windows? For the
coastlands shall hope for me, the ships of Tarshish first, to bring your
children from afar, their silver and gold with them, for the name of
the Lord your God and for the Holy One of Israel.” Isaiah
60:8-9
We
see this image again in Hosea:
“When he roars, his children shall come trembling from the
west; they shall come trembling like birds from Egypt, and like doves from the
land of Assyria, and I will return them to their homes, declares
the Lord.” Hosea 11:10-11
The parable of the Dry Bones in Ezekiel 37 is commonly
considered to be symbolic of the restoration of Israel after the Holocaust.
However,
there is another dimension to this story: the physical resurrection of the
return to the Land must take place before the Spirit of God breathes new life
into the people, so that they return to their God.
The
previous chapter, Ezekiel 36, also presents this order of events; first the
physical regathering, then the spiritual renewal:
Stage
one: “I will take you from the
nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own
land.” (verse 24)
Stage
two: “I will sprinkle clean water on
you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your
idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new
spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your
flesh and give you a heart of flesh.” (verses 25-26)
God
is faithful to all His promises, and to His covenant people Israel.
As we
watch with sadness the events shaking the world, we know that our sovereign God
is still in control.
He
continues to work out His plans and purposes, drawing all things to Himself.
There
will be a time, just as Yeshua predicted, when the Jewish people will call out
from the land of Israel to welcome their Messiah, “Baruch ha ba be shem
Adonai! – Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!”
We are an Israeli ministry composed of Jewish & Arab
followers of Yeshua (Jesus) who are all about blessing Israel through sharing
the gospel online, educating the new generation of born-again believers through
our one and only Hebrew-speaking Bible College in Israel, and helping holocaust
survivors by supplying humanitarian aid.
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